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[Music] one of the really interesting aspects of of grin's operations is the way you have
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been able to extend the concept of micro Finance Beyond just credit into areas such as health insurance uh I wonder if
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you could explain uh some of those activities uh and how they have evolved uh what some of your challenges have
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been uh we do not consider micro uh insurance or health insurance as outside the financial services so we take it as
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a part of our activity As A bank's activity we started with giving credit at the same time taking savings so it's
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a always together savings and Credit uh formed our basic tool and then we encourag them to go into other direction
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s about the health and other issues and gradually we introduce Insurance programs uh life insurance was our first
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insurance program that we did and the loan insurance that we did and then we introduced the health insurance program
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and we saw that we can give the health insurance facility but how do you ensure they get the Health Service because the
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existing Health Service is not a very reliable Health Service we started creating uh Health Services through a
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separate company we created called gramine colan or gramine well-being through that we started setting up uh
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clinics in The Villages uh with a professional doctor on the top of the clinic and then paramedics and the
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health workers with a pathological lab attached to it so that you don't have to
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go to the city for simple pathological testings and so on so everything is self-contained and today we run about 51
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such clinics and on an average they make about 93% of the cost they cover another
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7% we can cover easily if we could retain the doctors in this clinics that became a big problem doctors don't want
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to stay in the village the way uh the kind of clinics that we operate in The Villages uh so most of the time almost
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half or onethird of the doctors are missing so that's why our popularity in the area is not as
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high as it should have been so now we are trying to redesign it uh do it in a different way uh trying to set up uh
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program at the Village level what we call gramine Health Management centers where our Focus would be on
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prevention our Focus would be on the healthy people first and then to the sick people and and the sick people we
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say this is where we do the early detection and early treatment without relying on the doctors
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in the village so doctor will be in the city wherever they are we are trying to link the doctor and the patients through
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Information Technology mobile phone in Bangladesh is everywhere like many other countries now mobile phone is a common
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phenomenon even in the poor families you'll see mobile phones very cheap so what we doing and these phones are
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internet enabled phones it also carries the internet service so for Internet service you don't have to worry every
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single piece of uh space within Bangladesh uh can uh receive uh internet services through the mobile phone so we
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want to do the Diagnostics and plug it in into mobile phone transmit all the images and all the data to the
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specialist doctor in the city who can analyze it and tell you what the problem is and talk to the patient on the mobile
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phone and some intermediary young girl who can go go between the patient and the doctors to carry on all the services
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so this is the new idea that we are promoting and the health insurance is a very popular one I must say provided we
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can guarantee that they get the services uh we promised is there a plan to extend
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this further with Google uh we have been discussing with many partners uh already
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we have created a social business with Intel Corporation it's called gramine
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Intel company in Bangladesh and through that company we are bringing mobile phone services in the villages with
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Healthcare software included into it there are initial one that we are doing with that is a series of question that
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we place before the pregnant mothers and the questions are designed in such a way
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by evaluating the answers uh the doctors can tell you whether she has a r risky pregnancy see immediately you have a
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first choice uh that we have screened off one risky pregnancy uh then you can concentrate on that one and gradually
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we'll be moving into ultraso bring the ultraso in the family in the house uh to
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do the image of the baby inside the home and transmit it to the doctor and the doctor can tell conf reconfirm it that
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yes she has a problem and we can zoom in to that particular patient and so on so
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we'll be we'll be discussing with other companies like Google uh I'll be in this
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trip I'll be meeting the Google people to talk about it one of the idea that
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I'll be uh discussing with them is to how to capture all the patient data simultaneously as we meet the people
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talk to people all this comes in a way that you can put in a central server through Google uh uh and you have a
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global uh patient data available and you can analyze them you can you can find out the incidence of each diseases how
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the treatment is working which treatment is working how they're improving and so
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on lots of information can come out of that there are many ways you can do that very simple now the technology is
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available uh it can be almost Costless but at the same time extremely valuable information about the healthcare so we
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want to see excite Google and and others to get involved Google already has a lot
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of healthcare related programs but we are trying to see how to extend the service into the area that we face and
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uh collaborate with them by basing your model on getting funds from the borrowers uh rather than getting say
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investment money from International investors um does that give you enough money to to make as many loans offer as
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many services as you could or do you do you think that um outside money actually
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could play a role as long as it doesn't dilute the primary focus which is social
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good and not making money uh within coming Bank uh we are allowed to take deposits from everybody
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it's not related limited to the borrowers only it's just like a bank we can take uh anybody's deposits so that's
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open with inome in Bank uh each of our branch is required to make enough deposit mobilize enough
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deposit to carry out all the lending they do so that branches don't have to borrow from the head office don't have
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to borrow from another Branch so they are self sufficient with their money on top of it we encourage them to build up
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enough um uh cushion of safe reserves of the deposits because of the problem of uh disasters we have very frequent
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disasters at time of disaster you can't get your money back but you need to lend
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money more money than you did before to get people out of the problem they have face so we want to build up that cushion
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usually we recommend at least uh 30% 33% uh Reserve should be kept within that system uh today uh we have more than 30%
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Reserve or 37% Reser in our all our in the whole of gamine Bank some branches have more some branches have less but
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average of 37% uh we had no problem with the deposits we have enough deposits uh in
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that so we the question of borrowing from outside never occurred to us because we have enough money and I keep
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telling people that um literally no matter where we live we live in an ocean of money but the problem is the poor people
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cannot take a seep out of it that's the problem shortage of money is not there
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people have plenty of money they put in the bank uh people will very happy to the bank branch came near their home
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because vill just don't have branches of Banks Banks are all concentrated in the
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cities uh so if they have to put the money in the bank they have to go to the city and the town uh where the banks
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exist Bank BRS exist so gramine Bank Works in The Villages so it's a very convenient place people withdraw their
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money from the cities put it their near home because it's handy they can go anywhere anytime they go want they want
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pick up the money so we have enough of that money and we do not see any reason that it will ever dry out having said
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that uh what is the amount of deposit coming from the borrower themselves we lend out over $100 million a month
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through gramine bank today out of that money uh nearly half of that money comes from the borrowers own deposits so it's
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quite a substantial amount of money the borrowers to put in uh and that money keeps growing because everybody's uh
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putting additional deposits every week so it keeps growing and growing so they they have their own savings account at
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the same time other people can put in money there uh sometimes we see that maybe in certain brands we have too much
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money that uh what we should do keep that level of deposit without expanding the business we encourage them to expand
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the business rather than build up uh too much deposits [Music]